The department was all the more safely protected against any revelation of the most notorious facts in that it was administered by an Israelitish prefect.
Monsieur Worms-Clavelin held himself bound, by the very fact that he was a Jew, to serve the interests of the anti-Semites of his administration with greater zeal than a Catholic prefect would have displayed in his place. With a prompt and sure hand he stifled in his department the growing faction in favour of revision. He favoured the leagues of the clerical agitators, causing them to prosper so wonderfully that citizens Francis de Pressensé, Jean Psichari, Octave Mirbeau and Pierre Quillard, who came to the departmental capital to speak their minds as free men, felt as though they had stepped straight into a city of the sixteenth century. They encountered none but idolatrous papists, howling for their death, who wanted to massacre them. And as Monsieur Worms-Clavelin, who since the judgment of 1894 was fully convinced that Dreyfus was innocent, made no mystery of that conviction after dinner, as he smoked his cigar, the Nationalists whose cause he favoured had good reason to count on a loyal support which was not dependent upon personal feeling.
This firm hold over the department whose archives he kept profoundly impressed Monsieur Mazure, who was an ardent Jacobin and capable of heroism, but who, like the company of heroes, marched only to the sound of the drum. Monsieur Mazure was not a brute. He felt that he owed it to others and to himself to explain his attitude.
After the soup, as they were waiting for the trout, he leaned his arms on the table and remarked:
“My dear Bergeret, I am a patriot and a republican; I do not know whether Dreyfus is guilty or innocent. I do not want to know; it’s not my business. He may be innocent, but there is no doubt that the Dreyfusites are guilty. They have been guilty of a great impertinence in substituting their own personal opinion for a decision given by republican justice. Besides, they have stirred up the whole country. Trade is suffering.”
“There’s a pretty woman,” said Monsieur Bergeret, “tall, straight and slender as a young tree.”
“Pooh!” said Monsieur Mazure. “A mere doll.”
“You speak very frivolously,” returned Monsieur Bergeret. “A doll, when alive, is a great force of Nature.”
“I don’t trouble my head about that woman or any other,” said Monsieur Mazure. “Perhaps because my own wife is a very well-made woman.”
So he said and did his best to believe. The truth was he had married the old servant and mistress of his two predecessors. Bourgeois society had kept aloof from her for ten years, but as soon as Monsieur Mazure joined the Nationalist leagues of the department she found herself received in the best society of the town. General Cartier de Chalmot’s wife went about with her, and the wife of Colonel Despautères could hardly tear herself away from her.